Cover Story

Challenge of Change

Carefree of Colorado's Success in a Competitive Marketplace

By Don Magary, editor

Tom Faludy, president, Carefree of Colorado

Carefree of Colorado is a company that has successfully overcome the challenges of a changing marketplace while other companies with similar product lines have fallen by the wayside. The architect of this success is Tom Faludy, president.

When Faludy re-joined Carefree in 1989 the problems facing this RV awning manufacturer were significant. The Carefree Deluxe awning, the mainstay of the company's product line, had faced serious engineering and quality problems a few years before, but the company was still feeling the effects of those problems. Even though that problem had been fixed and Carefree had already introduced the Spirit awning, many dealers and distributors were reluctant to come back to Carefree. But more importantly, the awning business which was almost ex-clusively an aftermarket en-hancement, was suffering from the impact of RV manufacturers installing awnings, air conditioners and other products during manufacturing, a process called "packaging." Within a period of a few years, the number of awn-ings being sold in the aftermarket shrunk to only a percentage of what it had been traditionally. It was also during this period that RV News last visited Carefree of Colorado in Broomfield, CO. Last month we returned to Carefree and visited with Faludy.

He said, "A lot has happened in the past nine years. The competitive landscape has changed. We have found that these changes have been positive --  not necessarily positive during the time they were happening, but I think all the changes have made us better.

"The best advice I ever got from anybody was from my boss Ken Semelsburger, president and chief operating office of Scott Fetzer.

"When I came back to Carefree our world was changing. Certainly the changes in distribution patterns and the consolidation in distribution were challenges. First, you had the alliance between Dometic and Coast Distribution. And when that relationship ended, there was the subsequent alliance between Coast and RV Products. And finally, you had the reticence of the dealer to change with the times and start focusing his product assortment as regards to awnings to something other than the patio awning which was already coming on the RV.

"As I shared a lot of these observations about all these changes that were putting pressure on Carefree with Ken, he said, 'Do the right things long enough and good things will come your way.'

"There's tremendous power in those simple words. And there's tremendous comfort in those words as well. That's what we really tried to do. We have tried to do the right things, consistently. As it turned out we ended up being the beneficiary of some of these changes."

The challenge of learning how to become an OEM supplier might have been the most difficult. He said, "It was during those days that suppliers of awnings and air conditioners were experiencing the obvious impact of the Dutchmen phenomenon -- packaging. At that point we were almost exclusively an aftermarket business, but we had to learn how to become an OEM supplier.

"In the aftermarket you are more or less the master of your own destiny in terms of specifying your product. You say here is the best product we can conceive. On the other hand, when you deal with your OEM customers, they have very specific notions about how the product ought to be - from every respect, from price to features to how it's packaged. And for a company that was steeped in the aftermarket as we were for 15 to 20 years, it was a difficult transition. It was something we had to embrace philosophically as well as developing our systems and internal processes to meet the new criteria. Once again, I think we became a better business as a result of it." continued